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Awakening

1860, Salisbury: two Baptist sisters are locked in ideological and sororicidal conflict. The one (Beatrice) is a Calvinist, the other (Anna) a free-thinker. ‘Christianity is fissiparous,’ as Anna declares, to Beatrice’s disgust: the church splinters into sects and then the splinters splinter, till every man’s hand is against his neighbour. Awakening originated in a life-time’s passionate study of Victorian women’s fiction – and in a sense my dissatisfaction with this as a window into the private self. I was looking for gaps. What intimacies were forbidden? What were the penalties and sanctions for transgression? What was said and censored in the torn-out pages of Victorian diaries? My own four critical books on Emily Brontë fed the writing, as did Victorian diaries, memoirs and letters: e.g., Darwin’s notebooks; Edith Simcox’s journal; Mary Benson’s diaries; Sarah Thomas’s diary. I read sundry sermons. Awakening braids the fictional with the historical, offering cameo appearances by, e.g., Charles Spurgeon, John Clifford, Philip Gosse, Phoebe Palmer, Arthur Munby, Barbara Bodichon. Authentic snatches of their speech are woven into the text. 1860 was chosen as the year following publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and a spectacular religious Awakening in Wales. Anna’s ‘tump’ sprang from Darwin’s famous ‘entangled bank’, exemplifying the connection between biodiversity and the laws underlying the ‘war of nature’. The setting is an invented village near Salisbury, overshadowed by the great cathedral spire and surrounded by the ancient chalk plains, scene of crucial Victorian archaeological discoveries. The eating of the last great bustard in Britain was based on a real feast, as witness the stuffed bird in Salisbury Museum. I visited the cathedral several times for research purposes. The Honorary Secretary to the Baptist Historical Society generously furnished me with documents (especially obituaries) relating to the Victorian ministry.